m Lewis was languid and Mr Gilbert Cannan eloquently silent. Miss
Violet Hunt, rather mischievous, talked to Mr Edgar Jepson, who
obviously lay in ambush, preparing to slay an idealist, presumably Sir
Rabindrahath Tagore. I felt very mild near this young lady, so dark in
the white frock of simplicity or artifice, with broad cheeks that
recalled the rattlesnake, soft cheeks tinted rather like a tea rose,
with long, dark eyes, wicked, aggressive, and yet laughing. I felt very
old--well over thirty. For Miss Reeves had just come down from Newnham,
and, indeed, that afternoon she was still coming down ... on a toboggan.
When I met her the other day she said: 'Well, perhaps you are right.'
It's queer how one changes!

She was about twenty-three, and that is not so long ago; she was still
the child who has been 'brought up pious,' attended Sunday School and
felt a peculiar property in God. Daughter of a New Zealand Cabinet
Minister and of a mother so rich in energy that she turned to suffrage
the scholarly Mr Pember Reeves, Miss Amber Reeves was a spoilt child.
She was also the child of a principle, had been sent to Kensington High
School to learn to be democratic and meet the butcher's daughter. She
had been to Newnham too, taken up socialism, climbed a drain pipe and
been occasionally sought in marriage. At ten she had written poems and
plays, then fortunately gave up literature and, as a sponge flung into
the river of life, took in people as they were, arrived at the maxim
that things do not matter but only the people who do them. A last
attempt to organise her took place in the London School of Economics,
where she was to write a thesis; one sometimes suspects that she never
got over it.

This is not quite just, for she is changed. Not hostile now, but
understanding, interested in peculiarities as a magpie collecting
spoons. Without much illusion, though; her novels are the work of a
faintly cynical Mark Tapley.

She is driven to mimic the ordinary people whom she cannot help loving,
who are not as herself, yet whom she forgives because they amuse her.
She is still the rattlesnake of gold and rose, but (zoological
originality) one thinks also of an Italian greyhound with folded paws,
or a furred creature of the bush that lurks and watches with eyes
mischievous rather than cruel.

On reading this over again I discover that she has got over the London
School of Economics, though her first two books showed heavy the bran